As is well known in the art, e-mail communications are often managed by e-mail applications and stored in these applications for later retrieval. Examples of such e-mail applications include MICROSOFT OUTLOOK and LOTUS NOTES.
Documents of other types, e.g., word processing documents, are often separately managed by a document management system (“DMS”), such as IMANAGE™, PC DOCS™ or FILENET™. The word processing documents may be created and edited in a word processing program such as MICROSOFT WORD™ or WORDPERFECT™.
E-mail communications are often received and placed in a user's personal electronic mailbox. Often, a user's personal electronic mailbox is not easily accessible to others, nor is such ease of access desired by the user.
In some cases, the user may wish to make an e-mail and its attachments available to others without making the others privy to the remainder of the user's personal mailbox. In this case, the user might send a single e-mail to all those who need it. Such a task might be time consuming, especially if the user would like to send the message to multiple recipients. Moreover, at a later date, others to whom the e-mail was not sent might have need for the same e-mail and its corresponding attachments. Additional time would need to be spent for additional users to obtain this e-mail and its attachments.
With the vast number of e-mail communications and corresponding attachments received, it is also desirable to organize these e-mails and their attachments in a manner that they can be readily located, by both the original recipient and by others.
Some computer systems attempt to address these problems by allowing e-mails to be stored in a document management system. However, these applications store the e-mail message separate from the attachments and thus do not preserve the relationship between the attachments and the e-mail to which the attachments were associated.